It Happened to Me…

Precognition

Regarding the letters about ‘Dreams Realised’ [FT399:70-71], I feel spurred to mention the odd situation, seldom commented on, where a glimpse of the future in a dream becomes reinforced in a kind of loop, where the dream is a precognition of a later event, but an event that takes place only because of the memory of the dream. This interesting facet of dreams was mentioned in JB Priestley’s remarkable book Man and Time (1963). One notable example was where a young woman dreamed of chatting to some people in an unknown dingy flat, and then suddenly stopped talking, and resumed a few moments later. She was invited to such a flat some days later, started talking to the other guests, realised her precognitive dream was coming true which made her suddenly stop talking, which coincided with the non-talking gap in her dream.

This precognition loop happened to me in March 2013. I dreamed of visiting a strange nightclub with fake cave-like walls made of ochre-coloured ceramics. I approached a receptionist and asked “What is the name of this club?”. She paused, dourly turned away, and then muttered “Cable”. On awaking I thought no one, which I thought was as daft a name for a comic as for a nightclub. This “Cable” was apparently another name of a grizzled superhero called Nathan Summers. When I got home I mused about this incident, but couldn’t attribute it to pure coincidence. I felt I could not disentangle the two experiences – the dream and the subsequent visit to the library; cause and effect had become hopelessly blurred.